Over the last decade or so, for many businesses, it has become a necessity for employees to share data over an enterprise network featuring one or more local area networks. To improve efficiency, enhancements have been added to local area networks such as remote wireless access. This enhancement provides an important extension in forming a wireless local area network (WLAN).
Further, home networks including wireless home-networks, similar to WLAN's, have become increasingly popular. For example, in wireless home-networks, a home media server streams data, such as video and audio data, to client devices throughout the home. Better Quality of Service (QoS), and better bandwidth, allows the server to stream high fidelity content, such as video, movies, television, etc. to client devices throughout the house. Hence, it is important to optimize QoS and network bandwidth, which is particularly important for unreliable and lower-bandwidth networks, such as wireless networks. WLAN's and wireless home-networks, as well as other types of wireless networks, will be generally referred to as wireless networks.
Typically, wireless networks support communications between a station or server and wireless clients, and among the various wireless clients themselves, utilizing access points (APs). In general, each AP operates as a relay station by supporting communications between the wireless clients themselves and between the wireless clients and the server. Further, data transmitters within a wireless network, such as data transmitters operating using an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11 wireless protocol, can transmit data at different rates to different clients. Oftentimes, the data transmitters (e.g. including an antenna), are included as part of an access point.
Farther clients (i.e. from the transmitter), operating with a more error prone link, may be sent data using a robust modulation method such as 16-QAM (i.e. 16 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM)). On the other hand, a closer client (i.e. to the transmitter) with a more reliable link may be sent data at a higher rate, e.g. 64-QAM, which is less robust but is capable of a higher data rate. The problem is, that in many systems, both such data transmissions are effectively time-division multiplexed on the same frequency channel, which may result in inadequate bandwidth for some of the data transmission being multiplexed. For example, a slow data rate channel (e.g. the 16-QAM channel) may occupy, for example, 75% of the channel, which may not leave adequate bandwidth for a faster data rate channel (e.g. the 64-QAM channel). Accordingly, the overall performance of the wireless network is degraded.